Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Ramey Memo and Barry Greenwood

(Blogger’s Note: The last time I addressed the Ramey Memo, we had the most comments ever to one of the postings... I was a little disappointed that the tone, at times, became more combative than I care for. I had tried to word the post in an inoffensive way, but there are always those who take offense at almost anything... When my mother died, I was the sole owner of one of her bank accounts but knew her wishes. I sent checks to each of my siblings including step. Imagine my surprise when one of them, getting a fairly nice check unexpectedly, complained about it. I mean, you open the mail and a check drops out and you’re annoyed... but I digress.

My point here is that I am again addressing the Ramey Memo in an article that Barry Greenwood published in the September 2009 issue of his UFO Historical Revue. I publish it without comment, other to say that it offers a new and interesting interpretation on one of the lines of the Ramey Memo.Let the flame wars begin...)

RAMEY MEMO REDUX – LINE 5

by

Barry Greenwood

After a lull in interest, there has been a recent renewal of discussions about the "Ramey Memo" on Internet lists. The usual banter was swapped as to whether or not the document (as I will call it from here on as there is no evidence that it is a memo) is a top-secret message regarding Roswell aliens or merely a teletype taken from a newspaper office in Fort Worth, Texas.

For those unfamiliar with the Ramey document, it is a folded piece of paper held in the hand of Brigadier General Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Army Air Force based at Fort Worth, Texas (See photo). On July 8, 1947, photographs were taken of Ramey, his chief of staff, Thomas DuBose and Roswell AAF officer Jesse Marcel Sr. by J. Bond Johnson, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram photographer, in response to an AAF press release that the debris recovered from the alleged Roswell UFO crash was a weather balloon. The debris itself was displayed in an office for Johnson to photograph, which he did and his pictures were widely distributed the next day in national newspapers.

One can see in photo prints that the document being held has lines of text at theedge of visibility. Attempts have been made over the years to enlarge that portion of the photograph. The text however remains at the extreme limit of resolution. A few words do seem to be visible, asserting the document’s relevance to the Roswell incident, but little else is clear.

Readers of UHR (UFO Historical Revue) will recall that I dealt with this debate in the March 2004 issue, titled, "An Observation on the Ramey Memo."

In it I offered the possibility that the document showed signs of being a teletype dispatch, typical of a news wire taken from a newspaper office rather than being a military/government ocument with details of the recovery of an exotic machine possibly from another planet. Not surprisingly some Roswell proponents of the extraterrestrial notion reacted with anger. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem that there was any hard consensus beyond a few words as to what the document said.

On August 26, 2009, it was a hot summer afternoon. Not much could be done in the heat so I sat for a while to stare at a blow-up of the Ramey photo to once again take a try at picking out words to recognize. This had become a regular part-time activity for some UFO researchers since the photo was enlarged years ago (See the enlarged area below). The possibility of revealing sensation evidence of UFO reality and government cover-ups through this document was irresistible for those who have been involved in such research for decades. All one had to do was decipher the distortions and blobs that characterized the text. For my part, in between stares I pulled old clipping volumes of Roswell coverage to remind myself of the reporting on the story for July 8-9, 1947. I tried running the picture through a variety of Photoshop computer enhancements by brightening or darkening the image. It was to no avail. "How would anyone ever get this mangled, messy text deciphered," I thought. It seemed unlikely that muck could be enhanced! Wasn’t there anything better to do on a nice summer day?

Getting a little weary I noticed a cardboard pair of 3-D red/blue glasses from some leftover movie I had once seen hanging from a holder above my computer screen. Looking at it I said, "Oh, why not." The idea of using them seemed rather pointless, as I was not even looking at a 3-D picture. But nothing was being accomplished otherwise. I put it on. Oddly enough using the 3-D filters somehow injecting a small amount of clarity into the image, much like a pair of yellow sunglasses, (as has been advertised on TV) seems to make the landscape much clearer. It was certainly not enough to make the blobs more readable but it was enough to make patterns stand out more. I focused upon the portion of the Ramey document that seemed to be a little clearer than the rest. It is an oval area on the left side of the text, a short distance from the right side of Ramey’s thumb that obscures part of the document’s text . A few words like "…AT FORT WORTH, TEX." and "…THE ‘DISC’.." seem to stand out enough to gain a general consensus as to these decipherments.

On the next line down where "THE ‘DISC’" seems apparent, what I will call "line 5" out of the total of eight lines visible on the image, the previously mentioned oval area of visibility had text a bit easier to read, that I attribute to that part of the document perhaps being a little closer to the camera lens by means of its appearance of being held in a rumpled manner by Ramey and folded in an arch toward the lens.

I kept looking with the 3-D filter and noticed a pattern, a pattern that seemed familiar. But before I continue, a bit of explanation is needed about the length of words.

To check their letter lengths, I used "letter stacking." The lines of text formed on a machine, like a teletype or an old typewriter, have regular spaces between letters, words and lines. With letters poorly focused and defined, making them virtually unreadable, the number of characters in each word could be measured by running a straight vertical line from the centers of letters above and below the line in question to the centers of letters of the words in that line. It is like placing a grid over the page and counting the letters and spaces that give your word length. It can even work when the page of a piece of paper is curved in the manner that can be seen in this document.

With this in mind, and a 3-D filter at the eyes, a pattern was noticed. The second word in line 5, a six-letter word, gave the strong impression of ending in "GHT." Thinking this was an artifact of the 3-D filter I took it off and looked again. The impression was still there. A six-letter word ending in "GHT" didn’t make much sense. "SOUGHT," perhaps? But the article was supposed to be about something that was already found. But then I recalled one of the clipping volumes.

Having just previously read clips in between pondering the photo, I went back and flipped through it again. There was a press clip from the San Mateo CA Times of July 8th. Late edition papers for the 8th had carried the breaking Roswell debris news. Reading down the clip I saw this: "Lt. Warren Haught, public information officer at Roswell said…." And the quote continued to his press release. "HAUGHT" stood out like a sore thumb. It was a six-letter word with a "GHT" ending in an article related to Roswell. As long-time Roswell pundits notice here, "Lt. Warren Haught" should actually be "Lt. Walter Haut," the "PRO," or Public Relations Officer, at Roswell Army Air Field. The press had butchered Haut’s name, probably in the rush to publish news about Roswell. In the first rush of publicity after Haut sent out a press release on the recovery of a flying disc, the base and Roswell media were bombarded with phone calls from world media about the story. Most certainly, one or more wire reporters heard Haut’s name and spelled it phonetically, not even getting the "Walter" right.

In the Ramey document, we don’t see the word "WARREN" clearly in the text. But through letter stacking I’ve determined that the area before "HAUGHT" is a six-letter word and, based upon the use of the word "HAUGHT" in the press coverage, "WARREN" is the most likely fit in that area. Line 5 was beginning to fall together in a sensible fashion. I looked at the rest of the line. It was obvious that there was a comma after "HAUGHT," then words and punctuation of the following lengths appear: six, nine, seven, two, seven, comma, four, period. I compared the San Mateo Associated Press (AP) extract with the letter counts, verified through the letter stacking. To my astonishment all the words matched, except for one. The nine letter word. "Information" in the article didn’t seem to fit, being eleven letters long. What else could fit "public (blank) officer?"

It didn’t take long to find out. After flipping a few more pages in the clipping book, it was evident that a number of other press stories from different newspapers had chosen to refer to Haut the "public relations officer." The nine-letter word fits! We can now say that the Ramey document, line 5 reads:

"….WARREN HAUGHT, PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER AT ROSWELL, SAID."

The photographer, J. Bond Johnson, originally said that he took a flash AP wire dispatch about Roswell from the teletype machine at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and brought it to the office where the debris was to be photographed. He had said that he handed the dispatch to Ramey before the pictures were taken. Johnson later recanted on this testimony when he became involved with a group called "RPIT," or "Roswell Photo Interpretation Team." RPIT had concluded, among other things, that the debris in the photos showed evidence of symbols like ancient Egyptian glyphs on the foil-like material, that beams had symbols in bas relief that were possibly made of ceramic material. How a ceramic material could be deduced from a photo is a mystery but no less odd than the other RPIT conclusions. Johnson responded to the question of his contradiction as to whether or not he handed General Ramey the document by only saying, "Obviously, I was wrong." It is not that obvious why he was wrong!

It is also important to note that when dealing with journalistic teletype messages, they send long text, short text or fragments of information that later can be refined and rewritten. They don’t necessarily go into the finished product, a newspaper article, exactly the way they came off of the wire. Unless one has the exact original "flash" message from a particular wire teletype machine, it can be difficult finding a perfect match of lengthy text to something like the Ramey document.

Context is all-important too. One might be able to see shapes in the letters that resemble, but don’t exactly look like, the letters they are supposed to be. Words can be seemingly deciphered, but unless they fit into a meaningful sentence they can’t account for much understanding.

The key determination in this finding is the word "HAUGHT." It is reasonable to see the shapes of these letters in both the raw and enhanced versions of reproductions of the document. "Enhanced" does not mean that words were altered in any way. The document is bad enough for those with good eyesight, very difficult for those without it. So darkening of the text is an aid to seeing the letter shapes better.

But what if this reading isn’t correct? Let’s say I am just employing wishful thinking in seeing the "GHT" at the end of the six-letter word? Then there is no case. I have tested the interpretation on others who have agreed that the Ramey document word does appear that way. A critic might say, "So, just friends trying to please you!" I decided to consult the website of the most ardent booster of the Ramey document as supporting Roswell as a flying saucer crash with alien bodies, David Rudiak. He once referred to my writing on the Ramey document as "totally bogus."

Rudiak examined thirteen versions, including three of his own notions, of what other researchers believe the Ramey document says. Looking at line 5, five versions agree with "AT ROSWELL." One agreed with the word "SAID" at the end of the line. One (Rudiak) agreed in an early interpretation with "OFFICER," but later changed it. One agreed with "PUBLIC." No one had "RELATIONS," surely a difficult read being in a fold in the paper and without other context yet deciphered. One person interpreted "GHT" as "SOUGHT." Most importantly, Rudiak himself saw the "GHT" but believed it to stand for "WRIGHT," as in Wright Field, Ohio, where the Roswell debris was supposed to have been taken. But Rudiak couldn’t construct a smooth flowing sentence out of it. In all cases, the interpretations made little contextual sense as they built broken phrases, or the letter/space counts fit poorly. Bogus is as bogus does!

Let’s ponder all this here. I’m trying to think of a good reason why "WARREN,HAUGHT" would appear in a classified, top-secret government teletype about flying saucers and alien bodies being picked up and shipped to other government facilities. We have what pro-Roswell-as-ET advocates claim is the most top secret event in U.S. history, classified on a par with, or above, the H-bomb (if you accept the Canadian Wilbert Smith memo of 1950). Yet in what is supposed to be one of the earliest official bits of documentation on the secret, it draws on information from a public relations officer at Roswell instead of intelligence information on the debris, bodies, technology or whatever other science could be involved. And it then proceeds to badly mangle both of his names!

Would the military not know the names of their own personnel in top-secret messages? Worse still, would they rely upon a known journalistic error, leading to the absurd situation of U.S. Army Air Force intelligence depending upon the newspapers for part of its information on its own personnel along with the Roswell event? It is absurd. Then why is Walter Haut’s mangled name in the supposedly secret government document?

Given the context of line 5, it appears that the document is depending upon information from "WARREN HAUGHT" as a source to be read. Why would this have to be in a classified teletype when it could be read in the newspapers? And what would he have to tell military intelligence needing to be classified top secret that they don’t already know about the alleged crash: to which newspapers he was sending his press release? There is a great deal about this that doesn’t make sense if the Ramey document were a classified message.

If the Ramey document were not a classified message but a news wire, none of the above secrecy scenario would matter at all. Which option would Occam’s Razor cut off? In summary, it has been demonstrated that:

Line 3 of the Ramey document has a phrase "…AT FORT WORTH, TEX."

The words "..THE ‘DISC’.." with DISC in quotes appears on line 4.

The phrase "…WARREN HAUGHT, PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER AT ROSWELL, SAID." is the best reading of line 5 of the text because the word count, letter count, punctuation and meaningful context fit and make sense. It is very likely that this phrase refers to the text on line 4.

All can be shown to come from journalistic news accounts rather than from military/government documents. If you do not think this interpretation is fitting, I offer a challenge: have line 5 make grammatical sense with different letters, words and phrasing.

Much credit is due Mary Castner, Victor Golubic and Joel Carpenter for valuable computer assistance and comment.

Barry Greenwood has probably got it right. I know several people will desperately try and disprove him, but really the whole idea of some top secret memo being in Ramey's hand and in view of the camera was dotty from the start. I know Karl Pflock did relate how this had happened once before with a secret memo, but surely we must all realise that such an occurrence must be a very highly exceptional thing. Either the piece of paper contains something very important and top secret (in which case it would have been preserved and declassified and made available to science in due course)or it contains something trivial and unimportant (in which case it would be destroyed, as it obviously was).Therefore I agree with Barry's interpretation as far as it goes, and disagree with that of the RPIT, David Rudiak and anyone else who still believes the Ramey memo is the great "smoking gun". It isn't and never was.

At least Barry Greenwood spent some time viewing, and decypering it, whether-or-not his answer to line "5" is the correct one.

Others seem to be simply piggy-backing, and saying that concludesthe issue. It is very close to my first reading of it, I admit, and I have continued to include it as a possibilty. I have come at it at different times, with different takes, since my first reading based on:

1 The memo in its entirety2 the context of the previous line, compared with the current line3 letter placement

Decyphering the memo in its entirety would be the supreme, yet most likely un-attainable goal. Even still, there are certain aspects which require consideration. The word "victims" does appear to be the best word for that space, on line 2.

The word at the end of Line 4 is troublesome. I tried several, and eventually, given no other reasonable choice, as of yet, the word Aeronomy fits there. Since Aeronomy deals with atmospheric research rocket launches taking place at WSPG, it seemed to fit in context of the time period...at least enough for me to use it as a new base for a new try at decyphering line 4.

Once I inserted the word Aeronomy, some of the previous words began to take on new possibilities. The previous word looked to me, at that point, to be possibly A1 GHQ_, or, A1 GAPA. Because certain letters don't necessarily look as they should in previous spots, in the "memo" I did not discount that the last letter, in this 4 letter word, was an "A" (although, visually, it more resembles a "Q" or "R").

The letter count for WARREN HAUGHT could indeed work, at line 5, if that is really a third letter, and not just a smudge. I only point that out because the brightness of that spot is clearly much higher than the previous space, so although there "appears" to be an "O" there, it didn't mean that it truly contained a letter.

Secondly, the word after the next word (PUBLIC or BOWLER) appears to contain three letter spaces, and then a space. Even taking the fold in the paper into account, the other areas of the memo that do contain spaces, match in quality. This would make that word to have 6 letters, and would tend to discount the word "RELATIONS" as being the next word in the line.

I guess my point is that I think it is worthy of note, yet not a done deal. Also, Barry utilized the different known releases of dispatches, and knew of their wordings. If it is the dispatch utilizing the incorrect spelling of Mr. Haut's name, the rest of the "memo" should be the same wording.

Thank-you for taking the time to attempt decyphering the memo, at any rate, because since it is one of the few items that are a sure thing, as pertains to evidence chain, or pedigree, it is, in my opinion, worthy of consideration.

Interesting thread where the argument of the similarity between Press Releases and the "memo" is well presented, mainly the bad spelling of Haut (as it is for Wilcox / Wilson in the UNITED PRESS, 8 JUILLET 1947, DXR54).

Beyond these arguments, we may find disturbing the fact that Ramey walks and poses with a top secret memo in the middle of a Press Conference ...

Conference aimed precisely to cover-up by complotist proponents.

A General very professional!

Regarding RPIT, I always wondered what was the scientific method to mesure relative sizes (of sticks), or to conclude that it was ceramic, in ordet to proove something.

A contrario, the method is at least explained in the USAF "big" document, relative sizes of the sticks compatible with ML307 balsa sticks.

The study seems to use the argument of authority of the autors in order the readers dont ask themselves, never explaining the methodology.

You can probably guess my ID! Thanks you for your comments so far. I have a few of my own to offer.

Kevin reprinted the article from UHR but the original contained exhibits which, through darkening, show some of the points a little better (see under Publications, UHR #13).

http://www.greenwoodufoarchive.com/

To Bob Koford. I did wonder about the third-letter brightness in "Haught," but after seeing the words in the press coverage fall into place so easily with the "ght," it is apparent that there is obviously no three-letter word called "ght." So is it possible that real letters in the text can be almost invisible due to circumstances? Look further along the line to what has been translated as "..as Roswell..." In the raw copy the double L is virtually invisible but you know there are letters there due to a comma being two spaces along instead of right at the end of the word shape. Both the "ght" and "..at Roswell.." exist in other translations.

As for "relations," the press coverage described Haut as a "PRO" or a "PIO." At the time, PRO was the preferred title with PIO coming into more official use later. Due to letter counts and meaningful context drawn from what has been published already, if you agree that "Haught" is there then his title must include either "information" or "relations." "Information" was too long from letter stacking comparison of counts of words on other lines. The apparent space split in "relations" is only apparent due to the fold in the paper and the loss of the "foot" of the "L" either in the fold and/or through albedo loss of that small part of the letter. This makes it seem that there is more space on the right of the "L" than there really is. Or else explain how Haut's title was "public --- ------ officer" as the press described him?

Bob is correct that his interpretation comes close to the one I report. He sees "public," though I don't know how Haut's status as a "bowler" would fit into a TS message or even the press coverage! This emphasizes the problem of reading the letter shapes too literally in an already-photographically mangled document.

"...though I don't know how Haut's status as a "bowler" would fit into a TS message or even the press coverage! This emphasizes the problem of reading the letter shapes too literally in an already-photographically mangled document."

LOL - I totally agree. I am guilty of this very thing here, out of frustration with rectifying the apparent three-letter-word that comes next. I just got to the point where I said...ok...what do they look like without reading anything else into it, and I came up with BOWLER HAT. I didn't laugh it off out-of-hand in case it turned out to be some type of code phrase for General Marshall, or something along those lines.

Gilles raises a good point. Practically every objection to the document supporting an ET Roswell questions General Ramey openly displaying a classified document and his chief of staff sitting there doing nothing about it. This while in the process of playing out the greatest cover-up in American history beginning on that day. It isn't being a "skeptic" or a "debunker," it is using common sense. There have been a small number of inadvertent instances of classfied documents showing up in photos. In this case an intentional show was put on for the press. Both Ramey and DuBose knew what they were doing. Was the General so caught up in being photographed and getting into the newspapers that he simply forgot his responsibilities? Same for his chief of staff? Or were they perfectly performing their duties and the paper was of no security consequence? I'd like to give them more credit for being dutiful, responsible officers than others would. Don't think someone in Washington wasn't looking at the photos the next day and wondering what the paper with the lines was while an event bigger than all of the world's great secrets was in progress. Were Ramey and DuBose busted for it? No, nothing happened to them.

It has always seemed to me that the 'Ramey memo' was seized upon by the ETHers as a last act of desperation. Here was their final chance to prove a cover-up by means of some hard evidence; hence the numerous attempts to decipher the text and prove their point. When the USAF issued their report in 1995 they mentioned this memo but never revealed the agency which tried (and failed) to decipher it. So the ETHers wanted to go one better and decipher what the USAF could not.

One could argue that Ramey, caught up in the excitement of the occasion, momentarily forgot to hide this top secret memo. Then 5 years later, after the Washington radar sightings and the ensuing press conference, Gen. Ramey (who attended the conference) had composed himself and kept his mouth shut over what he knew from 1947. Such a scenario is about as incredible as any scenario ever could be, but that's crashed saucerology for you.

In other words, beyong the methodology's artefact of a Roswell E.T. believers sample, a better methodology (I mean something serious) must be to make the same "experiement" - sic - with independant people regarding UFO phenomenon, and with more 9 people...

I have first-hand experience dealing with the heartache brought about from the ridicule heaped upon someone who is even remotely involved in UFO research. I do it for myself, but also for everyone who has had the unfortunate experiences related to this fact.

The most important reason to properly deal with the "memo", at this point, is simply because the argument that "there is nothing there", or it "is unreadable", is absolutely false. Of all of the documents related to the Roswell affair, this one is the only one we can all agree upon, as pertains to its genesis. That is, we can all agree as to its origin, and to whether it is a "hoaxed" document, or not.

Whether it bolsters the so-called Pro-ETHers, or it resolves the mundane aspects to the case, it is important, because of the potential for agreed upon, by "the many", resolution to the case.

Something that is very bothersome to me is when one complains about something they should, but don't, participate in. If you want more people involved, then drop the "I'm not gonna waste my time with that" attitude, and participate. If no one takes the time, no one can be included in the complaints about it in a realistic, and fair way.

I don't think (but don't know for certain) that Barry is pro-ET, in regards to the "Roswell" incident, but he at least took some of his time to assess the "memo", and he came up with something noteworthy, and that can be afforded some respect. If you think I've got time on my hands, you are mistaken, yet I also took time to participate.

There's no respect to be given to empty complaints about the way votes turn out, by someone who never votes themselves, yet it happens at "Election Time", all the time! You want more participation?...then participate!!!

I do not have a "belief" in Roswell or any other UFO story. I'd rather let evidence lead the way. It is the reason for looking at the Ramey document. Bob is correct that this is a primary source document, since it appears in a 1947 picture related to Roswell. As such, there should be every effort to attempt to read it despite its condition.

There are clearly some words that for all the world seem readable and relate to the story in their readability. I disagreed with some views that the document was unreadable. Testimony from a primary witness suggested that the paper is a teletype from a newspaper office. With that, I checked to see if document text agreed with press coverage since, due to my involvement in the Project 1947 attempt in the 1990s to locate vast amounts of 1947 press accounts, I had volumes of press clippings from which to draw comparisons.

Believe me, it would be exciting if the document said that aliens were found and being studied. But I just wasn't seeing that in the various translations being circulated. The format of the document didn't look to be governmental, and I said as much publicly in 2004. Continuous looking at enlargements of the document I thought would eventually make portions of the text fall together. I feel that line 5 now has a reasonable translation for the reasons given in this new 2009 report. Maybe more can be extracted from the unfocused text later but I think doubts now exist as to this being a government message.

Because of blog comment length limits, I have to divide my rebuttal to Greenwood's article into mulitple parts:

Part 1

Greenwood says I wrote his initial Ramey memo debunkery as a civilian wire story was “totally bogus”. Quiet correct. It is totally bogus, as I (and also Brad Sparks) have argued previously, e.g.:

http://roswellproof.com/Fortean_Times.html

And here’s why his new arguments are also bogus:

1. Greenwood claims I too see “GHT” in the same position has his “GHT” in “HAUGHT”, only I make it into WRIGHT. WRONG!!!! Greenwood is so careless that he doesn’t seem to know that he is actually talking about two ***completely different words***! His HAUGHT is the word BEFORE where I have WRIGHT. I know I’m rubbing it in, but Jeez, how can one screw up that badly?

2. Greenwood also claims his read is grammatical whereas mine is not. My current best-guess read (where he has “PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER AT ROSWELL,”) is “WRIGHT AF ASSESS AIRFOIL AT ROSWELL.” (with period) Maybe that’s wrong, but I fail to see what is “ungrammatical” about it.

At least we agree on the “AT ROSWELL” part, just one more reader who acknowledges that phrase is there and that this message is definitely about Roswell. This is in addition to other wording such as “DISC” and “WEATHER BALLOONS”, that previously left no doubt (though Kevin has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that obvious fact, trying to argue instead that this might be a military teletype that has nothing to do with Roswell—or has this now morphed into a civilian teletype that is about Roswell?).

3. Several of Greenwood’s letter counts are very probably wrong.

Where he has HAUGHT is two words, a 2-letter word followed by 3-letters, then the punctuation mark, (although in fairness, most others also try to make it into a 6-letter word, usually URGENT, but it is not--there is almost certainly a space in the middle). Greenwood indicates he was aware of this, but he can’t get HAUGHT unless he ignores the likely blank space in the middle.

He is right that there is sometimes letter dropout elsewhere in the memo, as the two L’s in ROSWELL (even those these can be brought out by jacking up the contrast). But in this portion of the memo, the letters are very dark on both sides and letter dropout like this is much less likely. The tiny bit of faint gray random film grain clustering in the space between words (probably used to justify sticking a letter there) is no different than other such faint random clusterings elsewhere in blank areas of the message, such as in the spaces between lines or in the margins, and occasionally in other obvious spaces between words.

What I read here is the simple word “OR”, space, followed by “C47”, Greenwood’s “GHT”. Greenwood additionally argues that it can’t just be a short 3-letter word there because “GHT” by itself isn’t a word. (Note his implicit assumption here that his “GHT” is necessarily correct.) But there is nothing wrong with the 3-letter abbreviation/word “C47”, is there? I certainly don’t fault Greenwood for coming up with the extremely similar lettering “GHT”, just for all the rest of his argument and read.

I also very strongly disagree that Greenwood’s “HA” of “HAUGHT” look like the actual letters there. If you want to see a higher resolution version of my “OR” where he has “HA”, also compared to the universally agreed to “R” in “FORT” or “O” in “OF”, see my graphic at http://roswellproof.homestead.com/Victim_compare.html

Typically "A's" in the Ramey memo are well-preserved and stick out, like in WEATHER BALLOONS, coming to a converging point at the top. Better preserved "R's", are round and bulbous at the top with an obvious open space in the middle. Not so for Greenwood's alleged "A". The REAL letter there instead looks like the "R" of FORT or the one in ROSWELL.

Worse is Greenwood's "H". The real letter is rounded, obviously closed at the top and open in the middle, quite unlike an "H", but just like an "O", like the clear one in "OF".

Continuation of criticism that Greenwood has his word letter counts wrong, including ignoring spaces between words to force his reading, plus abruptly ending his "matched" phrase, which doesn't really match what was actually published back in 1947, no matter how he tries to spin it.

3. (cont.) More seriously, where he has RELATIONS (as in PUBLIC RELATIONS) is again actually two words, a 2-letter word, VERY CLEAR SPACE, followed by a 6-letter word. That alone invalidates his “WARREN HAUGHT, PUBLIC RELATIONS OFFICER… reading. Most problems in the letter counts are in this center crease area. In this position, most readers try to make Greenwood’s 9-character RELATIONS into a 3-letter word followed by a 6-letter word, instead of 2 & 6, as unambiguously proven by the column alignment (what he calls column stacking). To his credit, Greenwood did get the number of characters right, but then got rid of the space to force his “RELATIONS”. Greenwood claims the crease conceals the letter where everybody else sees a space. Bunk! There is obviously a clear space between two words and nobody else agrees with Greenwood that there is only one word here.

Finally, where he has SAID, at the end of the line, is very clearly at least 5-characters. Greenwood tries to finesse this by saying it is SAID followed by period. OK, but would the sentence abruptly end in SAID—period--with nothing following it? In most sentence constructs, that wouldn’t even be grammatical. More importantly, you NEVER see it in the actual 1947 bulletins and newspaper stories. The closest Greenwood can come is “SAID:” (colon, not period), followed immediately by a quoted 100+ word Roswell base press release announcement. (More on this point in next part.)

Collectively, all these incorrect word letter counts totally trash Greenwood’s reading and his alleged “match”. But don’t just take my word for it. Go to my website where I show you an actual and good-quality graphic with the column letter alignments and highlight where people other than Greenwood are also getting some of the letter counts wrong. Judge for yourself who is right here.

4. Now to detail where Greenwood misrepresents the actual AP bulletins and stories. In the real historical world, the EARLY AP bulletins use Warren Haught, public INFORMATION, not RELATIONS, officer, and “ANNOUNCED”, not “SAID”, and even if one assumes “SAID” was commonly used (it was not), no story ever read, Haught SAID, followed by a period and abruptly coming to an end.

(Note: In all the following quotes from actual bulletins and stories I am capitalizing the mismatches to Greenwood’s read, including the words before and after, to emphasize that you must ALSO closely match wording before and after in the Ramey memo, something that Greenwood never does. You simply cannot do this in the slightest with any known bulletin or story.)

The supposed AP story quote Greenwood supplies from the San Mateo Times of July 8 using “SAID” is also highly deceptive, since when you study the circumstances closely, this is an example of a newspaper editorial rewrite, probably not the exact wording of an original bulletin. Instead the Times article begins with an early UP (not AP) Roswell report, with nothing about Haut. When that ends, a line separator was inserted, followed by an editor of the paper adding, “IN A STATEMENT TO THE ASSOCIATED press Lt. Warren Haught, public INFORMATION officer at Roswell said: ‘THE MANY RUMORS REGARDING THE FLYING DISC…” with rest of AP version of press release, total, over 100 words, plus 60+ more words, not the fewer than 2 dozen words left in the Ramey memo. Great “match”!

(You sometimes see these hybrid stories where a newspaper editor might make use of several news sources such as both AP and UP and graft the two together.)

I found a “purer” version of the AP “SAID” story in the morning edition of the Miami Herald from July 9, all of it attributed to AP. First there is about 300 words describing the story before Ramey put out the final weather balloon debunking story. ]. (Contrast this with the entire Ramey message being only about 100 words.) This is followed by: (with capitalized words again showing differences from Greenwood’s “exact match”):

“Lt. Warren Haught, public INFORMATION officer at Roswell ARMY AIRFIELD, IN A STATEMENT said: (COLON) [100+ words of press release]

Another great “match”. The simple fact is, no bulletin or story that actually matches Greenwood’s read has ever been found.

Instead, the initial AP press bulletin read:“ Lt. Warren Haught, public INFORMATION officer OF Roswell FIELD, ANNOUNCED [no PERIOD] THE OBJECT HAD BEEN FOUND ‘SOMETIME LAST WEEK.’”

And then just after Bond Johnson was dispatched to see Ramey, AP rewrote this bulletin as, “THE ARMY AIR FORCES HAS GAINED POSSESSION OF A FLYING DISK, Lt. Warren Haught, public INFORMATION officer at Roswell ARMY AIRFIELD, ANNOUNCED [no PERIOD] TODAY.”

http://roswellproof.homestead.com/ap_chronology.html

Or this earliest published AP version, carried by some West coast papers the evening of July 8 (already went to press just before photo was taken):

“Lieut. Warren Haught, public-INFORMATION officer OF THE Roswell ARMY AIR FIELD, ANNOUNCED [no PERIOD or other punctuation] THE FIND HAD BEEN MADE ‘SOMETIME LAST WEEK” AND HAD BEEN TURNED OVER TO THE AIR FIELD THROUGH CO-OPERATION OF THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE.

...In these various AP stories from MANY newspapers, note that Haut is ALWAYS the public INFORMATION officer, not public RELATIONS officer. But Greenwood claims he has multiple stories referring to Haut as the public RELATIONS officer. I’ll be damned if I can find any from July 8, whatever the stories! I’ve looked at literally hundreds of newspapers and have several dozen early AP (and UP Roswell stories in my collection, and not one ever uses RELATIONS instead of INFORMATION. UP doesn’t even mention Haut or a public information/relations officer on July 8, instead attributing the press release from the base to Col. Blanchard.

You can find UP and the Canadian Press stories from ***July 9*** using RELATIONS, but again, NOBODY used it on July 8. Could Greenwood be invoking the typical debunker time travel theory? Yes, that is exactly what he is doing! The example he gives in his article is indeed from the UP story of July 9 written well AFTER the Ramey photo was taken (e.g., it extensively quotes from weather officer Newton). Greenwood has put “public relations” from UP on July 9 into a teleporter and sent it back in time and space and inserted into the EARLY AP bulletins of July 8.. Voila! AP’s “public information” magically turns into “public relations”. Neat trick, huh?

Finally, in this multitude of stories direct from the EARLY bulletins, it is usually Haut ANNOUNCED, not Haut SAID. The AP “SAID” examples from the San Mateo Times or Miami Herald were from more complete AP stories that were written shortly AFTER Bond Johnson left the FW Star-Tribune to meet Ramey, and before Ramey’s official weather balloon explanation was announced by AP.

Ramey’s involvement was first announced in a bulletin by AP at 4:53 p.m. CST (saying he was shipping the disc to Wright Field), just when Johnson would have arrived at work for the change of shift. His editor immediately dispatched him to Ramey’s to cover the story. This bulletin was the last item added, e.g., to the late edition Roswell stories that can be found in West Coast papers like the LA Herald-Express, Seattle Times, or the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Johnson took the Ramey photo somewhere between about 5:15 and 5:30, and by 5:30 Ramey’s intel officer was telling the Dallas Morning News it was unquestionably a weather balloon. But not until 6:30 did AP finally announce the official balloon story.

The much longer AP story that appeared in the Miami Herald the following morning leads off with this item, but this lengthy story with the SAID likely wasn’t written until AFTER Bond Johnson had already left, i.e. somewhere between the Ramey involvement bulletin of 4:53, a lengthier story carried by some of the West Coast papers that came out at 5:02 (quoted previously), and the weather balloon debunking story at 6:30.

Even if one doesn’t accept the timing here, it doesn’t really matter, because SAID is then followed by a trillion other words, not the fewer than 2 dozen words left in the Ramey memo, and the AP “SAID” story uses INFORMATION, not RELATIONS, and other words like Roswell ARMY AIRFIELD and , IN A STATEMENT, all not in Greenwood’s alleged “match”.

What Greenwood is doing is ignoring that which doesn’t match, cherry-picking the words he needs to make his “match” from MULTIPLE sources written at different times, including the next day, to create some fictional hybrid news bulletin, then claims he has matched it exactly to what is in the Ramey memo, and he has now--again--proven this is a civilian wire bulletin, not a military message.

Another misrepresentation and cop-out that Greenwood uses here, also harkening back to 2004, is--well--maybe the matches aren’t really exact because the newspapers extensively rewrote the bulletins. Time for another reality check: Usually the quotes in multiple papers are exactly the same, which can only happen if they are all quoting verbatim from the original wire story. Often we also know what the original bulletins said because we have surviving copies. (e.g. Frank Joyce’s collection of original UP teletypes or the AP chronology bulletin quotes in the Daily Illini newspaper of July 9). The newspaper stories are either exactly the same or almost exactly the same as the bulletins. There were many such examples given in my previous rebuttal, originally published in the Fortean Times:

http://roswellproof.com/Fortean_Times.html

And the final nail in the coffin of Greenwood’s “exact match” to some imaginary AP bulletin, is that obviously none of the AP bulletins or derived printed stories end the sentence with Haut ANNOUNCED (or SAID), followed by nothing more than a period! Even Greenwood notes in his one obscure newspaper quote that the word is followed by more material, far more than is in the Ramey memo, as proven by the previous quotes. Well that alone just kills his “match”, but Greenwood obviously tries to sweep this inconvenient fact under the carpet. There simply is no match here.

Back in 2004, Greenwood likewise exaggerated and misrepresented his degree of “matching.” E.g., he previously argued that many wire service stories also carried the words “the ‘disc’”, as does the Ramey memo. But you’ll never find any civilian Roswell story with the well-agreed on phrase “IN (or ON) THE ‘DISC’”. Brad Sparks and I also challenged Greenwood to produce any news story with the letter counts of the Ramey “disc” line, namely IN/ON THE “DISC”, 4, 4, 4, 3, 6, 8. There are no such stories to be found, nothing even remotely close. Greenwood’s “match” to a civilian news bulletin was again imaginary. (And with Greenwood now adding his immediately following “Haught” line to the mix, he would now have to find a wire story with matching character counts and words for the two lines and make sure one line follows sensibly from the previous one.)

Similarly, Greenwood “matched” the very generic “AT FORT WORTH, TEX.” But failed to go the obvious next step of matching the wording immediately before and after (the “after” here being the DISC line). E.g., what wire service story had the almost universally agreed upon wording “…you forwarded to the ?????? at Fort Worth, Tex.”, and why would the second person “YOU” show up in a wire service story, instead of the third person HE or THEY?

Likewise, it is impossible to match the universally agreed upon plural “WEATHER BALLOONS” of the Ramey memo to any early wire service story. In reality, no AP bulletin or story announced Ramey’s weather balloon solution until about an hour after the Ramey photo was taken. So we are back to time travel to try to explain the presence of the words in the Ramey memo, if this really were a wire service story. Furthermore, Ramey and people always referred to the material as a singular weather balloon and only the singular BALLOON was used in any story or bulletin of July 8. Use of the plural “weather balloons” didn’t occur until the next day, and then not in the context of what was found, but only that the weather services sent up many weather balloons every day. (No problem! Just stick the plural “weather balloons” of July 9 into a time machine and whisk it back to July 8 to appear in the Ramey memo, just like Greenwood did with “public relations.”)

Although Greenwood claims this is an AP teletype, he continues to play his old game of treating things in isolation instead of trying to match it up IN DETAIL with a REAL (not made-up) AP (or UP or INS or Reuters, etc.) story or bulletin, dozens of examples of which I have extensively documented on my website:

True matching involves more than picking out an isolated generic word or phrase here or there and saying you can also find these in some civilian teletype. No, you ALSO have to have a high degree of matching of the words before and after, and the lines before and after and throughout the Ramey memo. And you can’t employ time travel to insert words from stories written well afterward into the Ramey memo or grafting the word from one wire service agency into the stories of another, as Greenwood tries to do with “public relations.” And when the matching doesn’t exist, you don’t try to have it both ways, as Greenwood does, by claiming such matching would be hard to find because the newspapers always extensively rewrote and edited the bulletins, which is demonstrably not true. Are these concepts really that difficult to grasp?

To keep it real simple, habeus corpus, loosely translated as “produce the damn body already!” I defy Greenwood to find even a single bulletin or story anywhere that actually reads “Warren Haught, public RELATIONS officer at Roswell, SAID.” (with period and nothing following). It simply doesn’t exist. Nor can Greenwood match the lines above or below this in the Ramey memo in letter count or words with any bulletin or story, which is absolutely essential if he wants to demonstrate that this is a real civilian wire service story.

If “Haught” SAID something, what did he say? In the REAL world news story with Haut “SAID:” what Haut said was the 100+ word immediately following quoted press release, not the less than 2 dozen remaining words of the Ramey memo with well-agreed on phrases like “MEANING OF STORY”, “OF WEATHER BALLOONS”, and “AND/ADD LAND XXXXXXXXX CREWS.” Did Haut say anything like that? Did any news bulletin or story?

Finding matches to a few isolated words or phrases here and there doesn’t count. I also defy any of the Ramey memo naysayers on this blog to provide such a match. Good luck! I don’t think using 3-D glasses will be much help here.

So, in summary, Greenwood confuses words, ignores such things as spaces to force words, and again exaggerates if not deliberately misrepresents his matching with actual bulletins and newspaper stories to create an imaginary news bulletin that does not exist in the real world historical record. After doing all this, he leaps to his usual bogus conclusion he has proven this is a civilian teletype, so we can all go back to sleep now. I have no hesitation labeling this as the usual inane and highly dishonest debunkery of the Ramey memo.

Of course, uncritical and logically-challenged Ramey memo haters (some of whom have already weighed in here with their usual knee-jerk response—you know who you are) lap up this nonsense because they have the “will to believe” there is nothing of importance to the Ramey memo. Nothing new there.

Although I know others are just going to be angry, here's what I get out of David's long comment:

First of all, David Rudiak is passionate about the long hours of researching he has devoted to this "cause". Barry Greenwood's long devotion to the UFO cause is well established.

I personally do not take Mr. Greenwood's effort as a debunking strategy, at all. This does not mean I agree with his assessment. The facts don't lie, though...in that, as I tried to bring up, if the misspelling of Haut's name is the key, then why doesn't the rest of the memo line up with said interpretation?

Even though he went on for six sections of comment, this is what I think is the crux of David's counter-argument. It is a legitimate question. Even if my BOWLER HAT is whacked out, and it is a two letter word, and not a three letter word, etc., the fact is, it isn't very logical that only one part of one line of the wire story (the misspelling of WARREN HAUGHT) would have been inserted into this "memo", and then suddenly be dropped, as if in mid-sentence, to go on to another, entirely different set of verbage.

It just doesn't make sense.

It is either quoted from the mentioned wire story, or it isn't.

The question is also valid regarding the time frame of the wire stories, in respect to when the picture was taken.

As one of the "logically- challenged Ramey memo haters" David Rudiak refers to, I prefer Barry Greenwood's interpretation of the memo to David's, though neither is really persuasive. This is not because of the word, letter and phrase decipherment (which Rudiak does with painstaking analysis) , but because of the circumstances surrounding the memo and the Roswell story.

I and others have already remarked on the likelihood of Ramey handling a top secret memo in front of the camera. OK, it is remotely possible he was over-excited and got careless and that this was a, maybe, one-in-a-thousand event. Let's now go forward 5 years to the famous Washington press conference of July '52, which I mentioned earlier. Ramey sat with Gen. Samford and several others, including Ed Ruppelt, facing a huge press contingent. In those 5 years Ramey held a great secret (which maybe Samford knew about, but nobody else). He knew ETs had visited the earth in '47. He knew all about ET bodies, the craft debris and so on. Yet he said absolutely nothing about this at the conference, at a time when everyone was 'UFO crazy' because of the goings-on over the Capital a few days before. In short, he kept his mouth firmly shut. Thus the whole conference was a sham, a phoney. One, or possibly two, people knew the truth; but even after 5 years the public could not be told. Is this scenario really credible? No it is not. Especially when there was the Battelle Institute study in progress and the Robertson Committee was on the point of being asked to investigate UFOs (Ramey had no input whatever to either investigation!).Why was Ramey, so careless in 1947, allowed to face the press at all? Was there not a risk of him saying the wrong thing and 'disclosing' the terrible secret?

Yet Rudiak says I am "logically-challenged". The whole idea of certain high-ups in the military knowing this great and ghastly secret about ET visits, and keeping it to themselves even after 5 years, let alone 60 years, is just plain dotty.

My "logically-challenged" mind tells me that the USAF, if they had already known for five years the true identity of UFOs, would never have held any such press conference at all.

Yes the memo has, and had, zero importance. This is a logical deduction from a logically-challenged person. It is based on the fact that if it DID have any importance, it would have been retained with other Roswell documentation, declassified, and have been available to the GAO in 1995. It would also have considerable historical value. Instead this priceless scrap of paper was (I assume) quickly lost or destroyed. That is my logical deduction. Has David Rudiak, or anyone else, a better answer? Or is the said memo still stashed away in a vault marked 'Top Secret'?

A final thought: I doubt very much that the Ramey memo, whatever its contents, originated in Fort Worth. This is because the phrase "Fort Worth, Tex." appears in the text (at least people seem to all agree on this). If it was a military memo from Ramey or someone else at Fort Worth it would have had this in the header, or possibly at the end. But not in the body of the text. The "Tex" is certainly redundant. So, probably, is "Fort Worth". The writer would have written "here" instead. Therefore I conclude, whatever the text may contain, that it did not originate from Ft Worth.

David Rudiak seems to have got round this problem, on his website, by suggesting it originated from Austin, Texas, 150 miles to the south!

On general principles I have problems with extraordinary readings of the Ramey memo. That, however, is just my intuitive sense (not a synonym, by the way, for "common sense," whatever that is; I associate that phrase with sleazy politicians peddling dubious propositions). I do not confuse my simple gut feelings, in other words, with certainties that can be empirically demonstrated.

And speaking of empirical demonstration, David Rudiak has pretty much trumped the opposition, reduced (at least in the comments section here) to hand-waving. Good job, David. I don't think the Ramey memo proves anything one way or another (at least not yet, if ever), but it seems clear enough who has the upper hand in the argument at the moment.

Regarding various comments that if the Ramey memo was important, Ramey would never have let it be photographed: In logic, this is known as circular reasoning, basically, it can't be so, well, because it can't be so. It's considered false argumentation because you are using a restated version of a conclusion as a premise to support the same conclusion, and vice versa. Thus, if Ramey's message was photographed, it can't be important, also stated if Ramey's message was important, it never would have been photographed. And around and around we go.

The Air Force used a similar argument in their 1994 debunkery of Roswell. Stories of alien bodies at Roswell couldn't be true because Roswell was caused by a Mogul balloon, and Mogul balloons didn't have alien crews, also sometimes reversely stated by the debunkers as there are no aliens visiting Earth, therefore it had to be a Mogul balloon, therefore witness accounts of alien bodies are all false, because it was Mogul, etc., etc., etc.

In the case of Ramey, if you look at the 4 known photos of Ramey holding the paper, in 3 of them, the back is completely to the camera, and in the infamous one, it is slightly tilted forward, allowing the photographer to catch an angle. It could have been nothing more than Ramey unconciously letting his guard down for a moment. The way I interpret this situation is that Ramey WAS being careful and had a simple human slip-up that may only have lasted a few seconds. He may never have been aware that the print side had been photographed.

We certainly know of other such instances where people who were very security conscious blurted out high secrets or allowed sensitive material to be photographed, which I have previously written about on this blog, e.g.:

1. April 1944: Gen. George Miller, supply officer for the 4th Army, blabbed at a cocktail party about how D-Day was going to be in early June, breaking incredibly strict security imposed by Eisenhower on the subject. (E.g., entire villages near bases were evacuated to help prevent the date and place of the invasion from leaking out.) Although an old friend and West Point classmate of Eisenhower's, Eisenhower demoted Miller and sent him packing.

2. A high Naval officer the following month went to a pub and did the same thing, topping Miller's indiscretion by also disclosing the landing site and critical logistics.

3. Jan 1950: At the White House, Sec. of Defense Lewis Johnson blurted out to political columnist/radio commentator Drew Pearson about development of the H-bomb. By the next day, Pearson made it headline news around the world.

4. McGeorge Bundy, Pres. Johnson's National Security Advisor, carelessly allowed a top secret document to be photographed by the New York Times while he was being interviewed at the White House. This was published on the front page of their Sunday magazine, and apparently the super top-secret code name was very readable.

This is somewhat different than for the Ramey message, because the published Bundy photo showed the document at least 10 times larger the paper in the Ramey photo, plus being printed on glossier paper than regular news print, and with the paper almost square to the camera and nearly flat, instead of being steeply tilted, folded, and curled. (The Ramey paper was typically only about a quarter inch wide or less in newsprint, quite impossible to read in the newspapers.)

In the Bundy instance, probably because of the much higher quality and readability of the published document (plus its prominence in a major newspaper), either the CIA or FBI did immediately notice the slip-up and confiscated the negative from the Times.

However, the Times also published another photo showing papers all over Bundy's desk, no doubt some of them very sensitive as well. These were reproduced much smaller and were slanted away from the camera, closer to the situation of the Ramey message. To my knowledge, this negative was not confiscated.

One thing that is very similar about this situation to Ramey's was that Bundy was very much aware he was being photographed and as National Security Advisor probably as security conscious as Ramey. Yet he still slipped up.

April 9, 2009: The UK's head of counter-terrorism, Bob Quick, emerging from his car for a briefing, had a secret document tucked under his arm, flat and facing outward, showing details of a major counter-terrorism operation. A photographer with a telephoto took a photo where nearly everything could easily be read. A redacted version was all over the Internet within a few hours.

Unlike the Ramey situation, this document was 100% legible and fully public, somewhat similar to the Bundy photo slip-up. But nobody back in 1947 could read anything in the published newsprint or had any idea it might be sensitive. For what anyone knew, it might indeed have been Ramey's grocery list. It was 50 years before the photo was blown up sufficiently and concerted efforts were made to try and read it. This plus modern computer technology made it possible to come up with some strong consensus reads, which indicated, at the very least, this was indeed a military document definitely about Roswell.

In all these situations, the people in high security positions knew about the importance of security, but being human, still slipped up.

But by Ramey skeptic logic, none of these historical examples ever happened because the security conscious people involved would never have put themselves in the situation where it would have happened. Circular logic at its finest.

cda wrote:>>"...even after five years the public could not be told. Is this scenarioea really credible? No, it is not."

Starman wrote:>Sure it is. The Ultra secret was kept for THIRTY YEARS after WWII, i.e. 30 years after there was no longer any vital reason to keep it secret.

Quite. Lots of things have been classified for much longer than 30 years and remain classified to this day.

cda has this bizarre notion that government's must hand over State secrets upon anyone's request. I believe the Freedom of Information Act says classified documents need to go through a classification review after 25 years, not that they must be declassified and released if someone asks for them. If they are still deemed too sensitive for release, they remain classified, and you probably can't get your hands on them, even if you know they exist.

You still can't get your hands on the blueprints of how to build an A-bomb or H-bomb. Another example, the minutes of the first National Security Council meeting held after Roswell remain classified to this day.

NOVA recently did a program ("Astrospies") on a top-secret spy program during the '60s involving specially trained astronauts on manned orbiting labs, with the cover story that these were scientific labs. The program was stumbled upon quite by accident, and still remains mostly classified 45 years after its inception:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3503_astrospi.html

Nah, guys like cda know better. Secrets always come out after a few years. Why? Because he says so.

>>"Why was Ramey, so careless in 1947, allowed to face the press at all?"

Yet another debunker time travel theory. Apparently cda believes higher military officers at the Pentagon were psychic and would have known ahead of time that Ramey would make a mistake.

Back here on planet Earth with ordinary humans who can't peer into the future, there was, of course, no way of anticipating a slip-up. Ramey, of course, turned out to be careless only AFTER he faced the press. Nobody caught on at the time anyway, so no harm done. Ramey was actually very successful at selling the weather balloon story to the press. Hardly anybody brought up Roswell for another 30 years.

>Regardless of whose interpretation is correct, nothing happened in 1947. Ramey was perfect for facing the press.

Ramey had a history of being a smooth-tongued devil good at spinning stories, going clear back to his West Point days. At Operation Crossroads in 1946, Ramey had also lied to the press and got away with it. Ramey was in charge of picking the aircrews for dropping the A-bomb. Despite his hand-picked ace crew, numerous practice runs, and a bullseye painted on the deck of the target battleship (not to mention Ramey himself being on the plane), the bomb badly missed its intended target and destroyed most of the scientific value of the test. The way Ramey spun it was to call it "a complete and unqualified success."

>He had already fooled them with the balloon cover story.

Quite, but better stated, I think, as he was in the process of fooling them with the balloon cover story at the time the photo was taken. Although Ramey began putting out his balloon story about an hour after the initial press release became public, it wasn't until about 2 hours afterward that the balloon photos were taken, with Ramey's final "fooling" being to bring in his weather officer to make an official identification. It wasn't until 3 hours after AP send out the Roswell press release that the now official weather balloon story that AP published a story about the official ID.

>A final thought: I doubt very much that the Ramey memo, whatever its contents, originated in Fort Worth. This is because the phrase "Fort Worth, Tex." appears in the text (at least people seem to all agree on this). If it was a military memo from Ramey or someone else at Fort Worth it would have had this in the header, or possibly at the end.

If cda would bother to read what I actually have at my website, he would know that I do in fact believe the Fort Worth origins are in the header. In what I believe is the "FROM" line I read "HQ 8th AAF", i.e. Ramey's command at 8th AAF HQ in Fort Worth. "Fort Worth, Tex" could even be up there after "HQ 8th AAF", but would be hidden from view by a sharp bend in the paper.

In addition, I believe the very first line reads "FWAAF acknowledges", with the message at the end being signed by "Ramey", again suggesting Fort Worth origins.

There is also no rule that says you can't repeat the name of the place of origination in the body of the message, and I'm sure somebody can come up with a number of such examples.

One such example is on pp. 495-496 of Good's "Above Top Secret", a 1954 UFO report from "Carswell AFB Tex" (former FWAAF) and mentioning the object being spotted at "Carswell" 4 more times in the message, as well as "Mescham Fld which is NW of the city of Fort Worth." The author at Carswell could have used "here" or "this command" in place of Carswell and didn't need to specify where Mescham Field was, but did. Such is the real world.

>But not in the body of the text. The "Tex" is certainly redundant. So, probably, is "Fort Worth". The writer would have written "here" instead. Therefore I conclude, whatever the text may contain, that it did not originate from Ft Worth.

What cda leaves out of here, is that nearly everybody also agrees that the words preceding "Fort Worth, Tex" read something (a majority read "victims of the wreck") was being "forwarded to the" somebody-or-other "at Fort Worth, Tex.)

In other words, this has nothing to do with specifying the origins of the message and everything to do with specifying to who and where something was being forwarded.

Although Ramey's thumb is partially covering "the who", the end of "the who" may read "team."

If more than one team (or whatever) was involved, Ramey would have to be specific about which whatever he was referring to, hence the whatever "at Fort Worth, Tex."

>David Rudiak seems to have got round this problem, on his website, by suggesting it originated from Austin, Texas, 150 miles to the south!

Hah, hah, hah. That's really rich! In the real world, what I have at my website is that I think the words "Austin, Tex." are in handwriting at the bottom, slanted up and crossing the Ramey signature line. This has nothing to do with where I think the message originates.

I don't know why "Austin, Tex." is there, just that it is probably there, perhaps a reminder to contact the Texas governor, or maybe use the Texas National Guard there in some way, all speculation on my part, but nothing at all about where the message comes from.

Christopher Allen needs to stop making things up and then attributing his fantasies to other people.

cda wrote:>>"Why was Ramey, so careless in 1947, allowed to face the press at all?"

I sarcastically wrote:>Yet another debunker time travel theory. Apparently cda believes higher military officers at the Pentagon were psychic and would have known ahead of time that Ramey would make a mistake.

>Back here on planet Earth with ordinary humans who can't peer into the future, there was, of course, no way of anticipating a slip-up. Ramey, of course, turned out to be careless only AFTER he faced the press. Nobody caught on at the time anyway, so no harm done. Ramey was actually very successful at selling the weather balloon story to the press. Hardly anybody brought up Roswell for another 30 years.

Though it pains me to say it, apologies to cda for misreading his comments and accusing him of invoking a dumb time travel theory. He was actually talking about Ramey and the Washington press conference of 1952.

However, the answer still remains that nobody noticed Ramey's slip-up back in 1947 and Ramey was extremely successful at selling the weather balloon story. He was also well-known as a smooth talker with a lot of experience dealing with the press.

The primary reason Ramey was at the press conference in 1952 was that he had been transferred to the Pentagon in 1950 and made USAF Director of Operations. That put him in charge of ordering jet interceptions of UFOs, which he was there to talk about at the press conference. Ramey admitted to 300 such instances where the UFOs had also been detected on radar.

The press referred to Ramey as the Air Force's "saucer man". Both he and Gen. Samford, USAF Director of Intelligence and the main talker at the Washington press conference, were also written up as the Air Force's two top UFO experts.

Ramey also went on CBS TV a few days later to answer questions from reporters and did a good job of talking around their questions. Donald Keyhoe, who was at the Washington press conference, told Bob Pratt in an interview that he talked to Ramey immediately afterward and Ramey did a brilliant job of seeming to answer a question without really saying anything at all.

Ramey knew how to handle the press and was a very good choice to be at the Washington press conference.

For more on Ramey's UFO involvement and his role during the 1952 Washington flap:

>>"What a bunch of non-verifiable nonsense, put out by, as usual, a true believer engaging in wishful thinking."

>"Oh? I don't know about that:http://www.cufon.org/contributors/Sparks/Sparks_Rebut_Ramey_Message.pdf"

Brad Sparks certainly started out as a hardcore Roswell skeptic. From what I understand, he still doesn't believe in an ET solution, but now does believe something of very high importance occurred, and it wasn't a Mogul balloon crash.

Sparks was the first person to take a crack at the Ramey memo back in the 1980s and the first one to pick out some of the clearer words like "DISC", WEATHER BALLOONS, and FORT WORTH, TEX. These are now almost universally agreed upon readings. At the very least, they establish that this is indisputably about Roswell.

Barry Greenwood also agrees the message is about Roswell. But where Sparks and I part company with Greenwood is over his highly exaggerated claims (what I have also called "totally bogus") that he has conclusively demonstrated that the wording matches a civilian wire service story and is not military in origin.

What Sparks and I have written in rebuttals is that he uses matched words like "DISC" in isolation, and is unable to match actual wording of the Ramey memo to any real wire service story. That's the crux of it. If Greenwood were right, he should have no problem showing us the exact wire story with extensive word matching. That would be the end of the argument. But he cannot, because there is no such civilian wire story. It's purely imaginary.

Therefore, what's truly "non-verifiable" here is Greenwood's claim that the Ramey memo is civilian. Sparks and I have demonstrated that beyond any reasonable doubt. Instead, whether the skeptics like it or not, we have a military message of known provenance that is about Roswell.

I am going to try a 'reductio ad absurdum' approach to David Rudiak's main thesis. It won't convert him any more than his ideas will convert me, but here goes.

Let us suppose DR is correct: namely that the Ramey memo does contain the proof of an ET visit to earth and that Gen Ramey discovered the truth of this at the time, i.e. on or very shortly after July 8, 1947. We may suppose that other AF top brass also knew the truth about that time, but that it was all a carefully guarded secret amongst them (We do not know how many were thus privileged, and never will). However Ramey, among others, had actually seen the ET debris and bodies.

Now go forward 5 years to late July 1952. Blue Book has been assiduously working on UFOs for over 4 years with a few spectacular cases and a great many mundane ones. But they know nothing about Roswell, being kept out of the loop. Likewise other consultant scientists have been co-opted into helping Blue Book, but naturally they too are kept in the dark. Meanwhile in spring 1952 the Battelle Institute is asked by the AF to help out with the analysis & research (but not investigation). They too are told nothing about Roswell. Then suddenly all hell breaks - Washington is deluged with mysterious radar blips and visual sightings on two occasiona at least (maybe more), with consternation among the citizens and the AF. What happens? A press conference is called, with Ramey as one of the panel members. Gen Samford is told to hold the conference but we cannot be sure if he is in on the great secret. Samford addresses the press for 1 hour 20 min with several asides to Ramey & the Blue Book staff. Ramey, who knows the awful truth, sits there and says hardly anything except a few remarks about the AF jet interceptors and the delays in getting them on the two nights in question. Ramey, we can assume, is scared stiff by the thought that these UFOs may crash over the White House or the Capitol (if they can crash in NM in '47 why can't they over Washington in '52?). Yet Ramey sits there calm and collected and gives nothing away. Samford may know but Ramey certainly DOES know. The conference ends, nobody is any the wiser. Ramey resumes his duties and the USAF can relax again.

In other words, the whole press conference is a sham. At least one man present knows the truth, but none of the others do, least of all the ones that are actually investigating the subject!

And of course the press, keenly interested in it all, are given a completely phoney answer to the Washington sightings.

And for the next 50 years the great lie rumbles on and on and on. Ramey (and others) take the secret to their graves.

The scenario above is absurd, yes? Totally absurd. It is as near to impossibility as you can get. Therefore I deduce that the original premise, i.e. that Ramey knew the UFO truth and that it was contained in that memo, is false. I also conclude, for the reason I gave before, that the scrap of paper is worthless.

In response to Starman, yes some secrets CAN be kept, for decades if necessary; the secret we are discussing is different, very different, and way beyond USAF (or anyone on earth's) control. That is why it is a bad comparison.

Also, it was Samford whom Keyhoe spoke to, not Ramey; as told by Keyhoe in FS FROM OUTER SPACE chapter 5. He also spoke to Ruppelt. He does mention any contact with Ramey. Perhaps Ramey had to beat a hasty retreat before any inquisitor could get at him!

Sorry, I meant to say "Keyhoe does not mention any contact with Ramey". I trust what Keyhoe wrote in 1953, rather than what Bob Pratt says (when?) that Keyhoe told him years afterwards (when?). By Keyhoe's own words, he did not talk to Ramey at all. Once again we are confronted with conflicting testimony, first-hand or second-hand, about who said what to whom, and have to choose which to believe. In this instance I believe Keyhoe.

This is a partial transcript of Pratt's interview with Keyhoe. In other words, this is first-hand testimony from Keyhoe, not Pratt's second-hand rendition of it. Keyhoe tells Pratt he did indeed speak to Ramey afterwards and Ramey was cleverly evasive.

http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1999.htm

The complete interview was originally on Pratt's website before he died. Pratt went looking for information on Ramey because the National Inquirer (which he reported for on UFO matters) had been tipped off by another General that Ramey was a "believer." This was around 1976, as I recall, before Stan Friedman was tipped off about Jesse Marcel, which led to the reopening of the Roswell case.

RAMEY AND THE JULY 1952 UFO FLAP

(I had phoned Major Keyhoe because I had seen a reference to Ramey in one of his books and after introducing myself, we talked about Ramey and who he was.)

KEYHOE: . . . Ramey was the chief of the Air Defense Command.

PRATT: Did you ever talk to him personally?

KEYHOE: Yes, I did, after the conference was over and Ramey was very polite and certainly very smart. He managed to evade the pointed nature of each question and somehow seemed to be covering it anyway (Keyhoe chuckled), but of course that was because he had to. He was under orders like all the rest of them, but after that time I don’t recall having any other contact with him.

PRATT: Somebody told one of our editors or the publisher that he was an acquaintance of Ramey’s back in the ’50s. The man who gave us this was a former brigadier general himself, I believe. But he was under the impression that Ramey very definitely believed these (objects) were from outer space. Whether he would say that publicly, he didn’t know, but –

KEYHOE: Well, there were lots of them that did believe it, even at that big press conference. They, naturally, evaded these things, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I did ask the senior public information officer there, Albert M. Chop, who also believed although he wouldn’t admit it until after he resigned. But he believed they were interplanetary. But he said, “Well, I’m not going to give you any names but there are several pretty high ranking officers, including generals.” And I said, “Brigadier, major general?” He just grinned and said, “Generals, let’s just go with that.” . . .

Reading my link more carefully, this does seem to be the complete Pratt article about his interviews with Keyhoe. Pratt first talked to Keyhoe about Ramey in 1977, not 1976. It wasn't until 2 years later with the reopening of the Roswell case that Pratt learned of the link between Ramey and Roswell.

"We talked five times in 1977, 1978 and 1979 for thirty to fifty minutes each time. The first call was on October 7, 1977. I was trying to learn something about an Air Force general named Ramey. Ramey’s name meant nothing to me at the time and it was only two years later when I began looking into the 1947 Roswell incident that I learned much about him."

Here are some more comments by Pratt about his attempts to get information about Ramey from the Pentagon, only to be told they didn't even have him in their list of generals, dead or alive. You also won't find anything about Ramey on the AF website with biographies of about 2000 of their generals. Pratt and Keyhoe joke that maybe the Pentagon decided to "lose" Ramey because he knew too much.

THE PENTAGON ‘LOSES’ RAMEY

PRATT: All right, this is Major General Roger M. Ramey. Is that correct?

KEYHOE: Yeah.

PRATT: And he was chief of the Air Defense Command at that time?

KEYHOE: That’s right.

PRATT: Son of a gun. An Air Force public affairs guy (at the Pentagon) went through his list of generals the other day and could find no reference to any such man (Ramey).

KEYHOE: Oh, for– (laughs)

PRATT: That’s curious. But he said the list was almost complete but not quite. I’m not quite sure what that meant. He had all living and dead generals but he couldn’t come across any by that name.

KEYHOE: Well, it’s possible, since you were inquiring about top figures connected with UFOs, that they may have just simply decided not to give you that information. What kind of an article, if you don’t mind, are you planning to do on this?

PRATT: Well, this came down from the publisher who said, this guy (Ramey) if you can find him, he used to believe that UFOs came from outer space. Why don’t you find him and talk to him? Well, I have to find out first what his real name is and then find out if he’s still living and, if so, where he is living, and then if he’ll talk to us about such things. So many high-ranking former officers just will not talk about UFOs, if they believe anything, you know?

Again, Pratt mentions that they had been tipped off that Ramey was a UFO ET "believer", which was why Pratt was trying to track him down.

"..the secret we are discussing is different, very different, and way beyond USAF (or anyone on earth's) control."

Yes indeed, which is all the more reason to keep it covered up! Alien craft were buzzing the nation's capital, and the USAF was powerless to stop them (unless you believe the shoot down stories). What would be the point of admitting they're real? It would cause grave consternation for nothing--what could they do? As long as the ETs don't attack, or make themselves too conspicuous, the secret can be kept, easily. As for a possible crash, the government had to deal with a number of them, post Roswell. They already knew what to do--confiscate the material, silence the witneses and invent a cover story. No matter how ridiculus the latter was, they could always count on people like cda to support it.

Barry, If I may, the problem I see is that you are making the huge assumption that this is a teletype that "came in" vs a teletype that was prepared to "go out". This memo may be a draft letter being sent to news agencies or maybe even to Haut to say the incident was nothing more than a weather balloon.